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The temptation

Day 13, Monday: Issue a public apology. This can be as funny or as serious or as creative as you want it to be.

Dear Bev, our childhood neighbor,

I am sorry for every flower we picked, every piece of birch bark we ripped off your tree and every flower bed we trampled through.

Your white birch trees were the candy of the block. No other neighbor had them. Do you realize HOW cool that bark was? The rich red insides allowed us to use sticks to draw pictures. The bark was our paper while we played house in our pine trees.

And those flowers, they made excellent house decorations…and in order to get the right arrangement, we may have walked through your garden to get them.

I realize now that ripping the birch off your trees made them look ugly and endangered them to disease. I know you told us that many times, but the satisfaction of tearing the bark could not be matched. And those flowers took TLC to grow. But I assure you, we thought they were beautiful too! We just could not resist. Our pretend family adored them.

While we were the nuisance neighbor kids who trampled through your beautiful lawn, I promise, we did help maintain your grass! You know those little white flowers that the bunnies would eat? We liked them too. The sweet nectar inside was a treat! One less weed to pick. Oh and we successfully scared away any animals out of our yard too.

Our sincere apologies,

Kate (and Ali — she will thank me later)

What did you do as a child that you KNOW you shouldn’t have? Did you make any of your neighbors mad? How long did it take for you to learn your lesson?